Julia Thomas

Biography

Julia Thomas grew up in the coal country of southwest Virginia, and her love of those Appalachian mountains informs her teaching and research. Today she works to bring Anthropocene sciences together with Anthropocene histories. Her publications include Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology (winner of the AHA John K. Fairbank Prize); The Anthropocene: A Multidisciplinary Approach, written with geologists Mark Williams and Jan Zalasiewicz; and Strata and Three Stories with Jan Zalasiewicz. She is also editor of four books, Japan at Nature’s Edge: The Environmental Context of a Global Power; Rethinking Historical Distance; Visualizing Fascism: The Twentieth-Century Rise of the Global Right; and Altered Earth: Getting the Anthropocene Right as well as over thirty-five essays including three in the American Historical Review: ““The Cataracts of Time: Wartime Images and the Case of Japan,”” ““Not Yet Far Enough: The Environmental Turn”” and ““History and Biology in the Anthropocene: Questions of Scale, Questions of Value.“” With colleagues around the world, Thomas seeks to bridge the divide between the humanities and the sciences to address our global environmental crisis.